Label:
Bee And Smoke
Release Date:
20/03/2006

Thom Yorke is a fucking liar: “Anyone can play guitar”, he told me as an impressionable youth. Not so. Also, “I wanna be Jim Morrison”? Crap, that; if he really did, he’d be dead by now, right? Liar. At least The Oscillation pull no wool over eyes blinded by possibility: although titled ‘New Way To Feel’, the outfit fronted by multi-instrumentalist Demian Castellanos don’t hide their psychedelic, drone-rock roots, and in turn make no promises they can’t honour. Thus, this actually has us feeling a way we’ve felt before.

And that’s weird, kinda – all the swirls and curves and dips and peaks of ‘New Way To Feel’ have the listener hypnotised, transfixed by the smoky trails that draw pentagrams before their widened pupils in a hall of mirrors. It’s Spiritualised getting spiritualised, Primal Scream’s flower-power era dragged through a Dead Meadow. It’s outer space in your inner space, instruments flowing forward and backward over thumping, repetitive drums provided by Art Brut’s Mikey B. It staggers groggily to a muted close, never really reaching the combustive climax suggested throughout, and the needle fails to return to its place of rest, trapped instead in a loop of silence. B-side ‘Waves Of Radiation’ rather ups the trip-out ante: it drones and moans as laser effects pulse from some place deep within the slab of blue vinyl on the turntable. These grooves, dare we suggest, go deeper than the eye can see. Truly, these are waves of mutilation.

If effects pedals and fingers on a fret can have this kind of effect on the layperson, then it’s a good thing that not everyone can play guitar. Thom, I take it all back: thanks. Oh, and well done for not being dead and stuff.